Senate Vote Supports New Telemedicine Programme

In a
unanimous vote, 97-0, the U.S. Senate recently approved the Expanding Capacity
for Health Outcomes (ECHO) Act, paving the way for a national network of
hub-and-spoke telemedicine platforms to provide education and collaboration
opportunities for healthcare providers in hard-to-reach areas.

The ECHO Act aims to make University of New Mexico's groundbreaking Project ECHO (Extension
for Community Healthcare Outcomes) telemedicine programme a national model for
healthcare collaboration. Project ECHO was launched by UNM's Health Sciences
Center in 2011 to connect healthcare specialists with rural providers and their
patient populations through a telehealth platform. The programme created a
hub-and-spoke model, in which specialists at a hub hospital would conduct
virtual teleECHO clinics for providers in rural health systems, or spoke sites.

Initially,
UNM’s Project ECHO focused on providers treating patients with Hepatitis C and
was favourably reviewed in a study that year by the Health and Human Services
Department’s Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).

Since then,
the model has been adopted by the Department of Veterans Affairs and several
health systems around the country. In Hawaii, for example, two ECHO clinics
were opened early this year. In just three months, "we've already provided
over 100 hours of continuing medical education and we have had inquiries to
start four more ECHO clinics on important local topics,” said Kelly Withy, MD, PhD,
director of the Hawaii-Pacific Basin Area Health Education Center at the
University of Hawaii’s John A. Burns School of Medicine.

“Medical
knowledge is exploding, but it’s often not travelling the last mile to ensure
that patients get the right care in the right place at the right time,” according
to Sanjeev Arora, MD, founder and director of Project ECHO at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine. “If we can leverage technology to spread best
practices through case-based learning and mentoring of providers, we can move
knowledge – instead of patients – to get better care to rural and underserved
communities across the country.”

The
legislation calls on the Health and Human Services Department to prepare a
report within two years on the various applications of Project ECHO around the
country, examining their impact on, amongst other things: